Past Misdeeds: Hundra (1983)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


One day, while their best warrior Hundra (Laurene Landon) is away hunting, a generally peaceful village of amazons is attacked and eradicated by a band of ugly, hairy men riding under the sign of the bull. When all is over, a returning Hundra dispatches a horde of the aggressors in a drawn-out fight, but that still leaves her people quite dead.

Our heroine then makes her way to the only remaining elder of her kind, who for some inexplicable reason dwells among a horde of really rude little people. Though after hearing the sage's glorious plan for the revivification of her people, I'm not surprised by anything about her, for she declares Hundra to now be solely responsible for the survival of the tribe. Our poor, bedraggled heroine shall go down to the land of the men praying to the bull, and get herself pregnant stat.

But Hundra's first attempt at getting pregnant only teaches her one thing: she still has certain standards, and won't tolerate the attentions of hairy, unwashed guys who'll even turn consensual sex into rape. So, after showing off her wrestling skills and sneering at less feminist women than herself (she'd get along well with a certain type of Internet feminists), off she rides to what goes under the term of "city" in sword and sorcery land.

There she will get into trouble with the ruling cabal of religious male chauvinist pigs whose religion is orgies, meet a man who doesn't stink and isn't a jerk, learn the womanly arts, teach the warrior arts to her teacher of womanly arts, and be somewhat responsible for a death by sitting on a face.

Among the many, many films jumping on the bandwagon created by John Milius's Conan the Barbarian, Hundra is one of the most unique in that it isn't slavishly copying all of its predecessor's story beats and aping its philosophy, but actually having a head of its own. Admittedly, Hundra's head just might be as much full of nonsense as it is of clever ideas, but I find it difficult to disagree with a film that is clearly having so much fun. Plus, you can say the same about the Milius movie, too.

Still, having fun or not, Hundra is at times a film sending very mixed messages. Tonally, it's just very inconsistent, with scenes of really unpleasant slow-motion violence like the destruction of Hundra's village (ending - especially tasteful - with the rape of Hundra's teenage-at-best sister) and sequences of Hundra romping through the city and kicking guards in the balls (one of her favourite fighting moves) standing in strange contrast to each other, quite as if half of the film were made by a low-rent Sam Peckinpah and the other half by the director of one of the later Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies. I suspect part of this curious mixture is just director Matt Cimber (a man with a career so curious someone should write a book about him, as he did Hundra as well as Pia-Zadorasploitation) fulfilling his quota of exploitational values, just that in this film, violence towards women after the big village destruction usually leads to Hundra giving the respective prick a kick in the respective balls. It's a bit like a woman in prison film where all the male bad guys are dispatched before the grand climax, and therefore don't have enough time to get really sadistic.

At times, when it's not spending its time having strange plot holes (so, the main bad guys are all about seeing Hundra “tamed”, but then they somehow don't realize when she's pregnant?) or making jokes about Hundra's cowardly male dog, Hundra actually becomes a somewhat clever inversion of the classic sword and sorcery tale, where the storyteller suddenly realizes that treating women like objects isn't alright at all, and sends out a female version of Conan to sort things out with men. The film plays with a lot of traditional sword and sorcery elements this way, turning what begins like the usual tale of vengeance into the story of a woman who learns that a lot of men are indeed shits, but not all of them, and that consensual sex is a-okay if both partners want to have it. And in a really surprising turn of events, this does not lead to our heroine giving up on her curious destiny and only ever living for her man from then on, but just sees her psychologically better prepared for it. Of course, her male love interest here is just as bland as the female love interest in sword and sorcery movies with a male hero often is, so it's not too much of a surprise she can leave him (at least for a time - the film actually is all about choice on that level).


These clever bits are surrounded by an Ennio-Morricone-scored shot in Spain series of fights, brawls and slow-motion attacks (with a bit of nudity), bad jokes, good jokes, male characters so vile I'm sure they don't wash, and Spanish actors speaking English with heavy accents. It's a bit of mess, really, but so much of the film is riding on a wave of fun, with a lead actress who may not be all that great at, well, acting, but sure seems to have as much of a blast in her slightly awkward action scenes as her character has. That sort of thing always goes a long way in turning awkward action scenes into loveable awkward action scenes. And once a film is like Hundra and mixes its loveable awkward action scenes with kinda sorta feminism that would make John Milius (and Robert E. Howard, for that matter) cry, there isn't really anything anyone could do to remove it from the warm place it has found in my heart.